… Look what happened in the wake of the 9-11 attack upon the World Trade Center: thousands of American men and women were radicalized—moved by murder from the air—after viewing images of their homeland under attack. We Americans honor their reaction as “patriotism.”

Americans will always remember 9-11, but curiously, we don’t expect other people to react in a similar, visceral, patriotic way when their homelands are bombed. President Richard Nixon discovered how to make war more palatable to American voters. When he took office in the midst of the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Nixon did something unprecedented in the history of war: he upped the killing of Indochinese, but accomplished the feat with fewer U.S. casualties. As the president withdrew U.S. ground troops from Vietnam, he dramatically increased the ferocity of the air war. As Nixon slaughtered many more people than his predecessor President Lyndon Johnson, the removal of American boots shifted the Vietnam War from the front to the back of the American mind.

Maybe we Americans have difficulty understanding the immediate and extreme reactions that dropping U.S. bombs creates because our homeland has never been carpet-bombed … //

… Millions of Muslims become aware of fellow Muslims killed by U.S. bombs via the Internet. We Americans are not allowed to see these images, so we believe the explanation of our leaders when they explain that a shooter was “radicalized over the Internet.” Our eyes never see the body parts of Muslims we’ve blown apart. So we experience the effects—like the San Bernardino and Orlando reprisals—but we are blind to the causes. As blinkered citizens, we buy the U.S. government’s obfuscating narrative, while millions of others around the world see the ugly truth.

Officials have deftly shifted our attention to the fact that Omar pledged allegiance to ISIS. In his highly emotional last hours Omar did spout a lot of contradictory nonsense, like identifying with Muslim factions who actually oppose one another. So you can pick and choose your version of this story.

Many of my American friends believe that the U.S. bombing of Muslims has nothing to do with them attacking us. If they’re right, this would be history’s first example where a bombed populace didn’t fight back … //

Brexit Confirms: The Center Cannot Hold, on teleSUR english, by Jerome Roos, June 28, 2016: Brexit has less to do with Britain’s relationship to Europe than it has with neoliberal elites losing control over the monsters they have created;

You are not laughing now, are you?’ Nigel Farage at European Parliament (FULL SPEECH), 6.51 min, uploaded by RT, June 28, 2016 … UKIP MEP Nigel Farage slammed the European Parliament in the first session since ‘Brexit’ in Brussels, Tuesday;

Richard Wolff: Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens, 20.19 min, uploaded by David Pakman Show, June 1, 2016 … Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, and currently a visiting professor at the New School University in New York City, joins David to discuss his new book Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown 2010-2014, the fantasy so-called pure capitalism, and more;